For centuries, Italy’s vast wealth of art and architecture has attracted awed visitors. Anyone of means who wished to be viewed as cultured and cultivated embarked on the obligatory Grand Tour. For aspiring painters, sculptors, and architects, a sojourn in Italy, absorbing the lessons of masterworks, beginning with antiquity and the Renaissance, was long deemed to be an essential part of their training. Even today, artists compete for versions of the Prix de Rome, admittedly for different reasons and with different emphasis than their ancestors, but with equal enthusiasm. Yet for a group of intense, young (mostly Northern) Italian artists, poets, and writers in the early years of the twentieth century, this rich heritage was neither a stimulus nor something to be proud of. Rather, it was an oppressive burden from which they longed to escape. Far from striving to reach the level of their aesthetic ancestors, this gang of contrarians famously—and publically—rejected the past. They loudly announced that they valued only the most extreme manifestations of the modern machine age and recommended that everything else be destroyed. These forward-looking radicals were, of course, the Futurists.
The leader of these non-conformists was the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the first Futurist Manifesto, a deliberately outrageous call to arms published in 1909, initially in La gazzetta dell’Emilia, in Bologna, and
